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The Star’s Nicholas Keung has offered a fascinating peek through the keyhole of Stephen Harper’s brain on the question of immigrants.

Yes, Harper does want women to stay home, that is, if their home is the Philippines. But Canadians disagree. No immigrants are more warmly welcomed than the women who come here to take care of Canadian children while both parents go out to work. Suggest ending the live-in caregiver program — the LCP as the government calls it and I won’t — and parents get that wild-eyed look. Sell the pets, sell the jewels, but let’s keep Divina, the children happily do her bidding.

Employment Minister Jason Kenney, stuck with the Temporary Foreign Worker program he loves and Canadians hate, has said some disturbing things about the nanny program, calling it “out of control” and having “mutated” into a family reunification program in which Filipinos already here hire family members, Keung reported.

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But overwhelmingly nannies are hired by agencies, not relatives, as a new study shows. And I am not aware that the Canadian birth rate is shooting up, which might be the only thing that would make nannies multiply exponentially. It is low in all developed countries because life is so hard for working families with children. And the nanny program has not mutated. It is what immigration has always been: a way to bring your family here.

Why else would immigrants come to Canada? They wanted to see what snow looked like?

This peculiar affection for one’s family is shared by everyone but me. I once silenced a CBC Radio debate that included Justin Trudeau before he became Liberal leader. Maybe people emigrate from the old country to escape their families, I said brightly. It’s possible.

The lights flickered and the air was suddenly icy. Fine, I took it back, everyone wants to be with their family full-time non-stop.

And in this case they do. Filipino women make the heart-ripping decision to come to Canada to care for other people’s little children so that they can eventually bring their own here for a better life. These kids will have spent significant years without their mothers. They may not thank them.

Nannies apply for permanent residency after two years of full-time live-in employment. They can then apply to have their children join them, a fraught process that is taking much longer than it used to. It can go wrong and it’s a risk.

In private, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander is said to have been asking about “modernizing” the program. He seems to be suggesting that nannies shouldn’t get “automatic permanent residency” at all, Keung reported.

But if they didn’t, they wouldn’t come here. They’d be just another worker slotted into the scandalous Temporary Foreign Workers program — still basically unchanged by Harper — that so enrages Canadians. Underpaid and therefore abused people with no loyalty to Canada, Alexander’s brand of temp would steal local jobs by working cheap, and then they’d be sent back.

Instead Canada wants skilled immigrants with an emotional investment in the country in which they want their children to prosper. Nannies are well-educated hard-working people with ambition. You couldn’t find more worthy immigrants.

The faster you let nannies in, the younger their children will be on arrival and the more they will thrive in a new landscape safe in their parents’ care. Everybody wins.

It’s as if the Tories have been squaring and cubing. Multiply one nanny by three children and square those three, you get nine, and if each of those nine had seven children ... that’s 63 Filipinos, plus spouses. Chris Alexander faints and Jason Kenney is screaming.

I am calm. I wish my children to hire excellent nannies and also for splendid elder care when I am in my dotage. Calling the good people of the Philippines, please come to Canada and care for a hapless and helpless nation.

Heather Mallick’s column appears Monday and Wednesday on the op-ed page and Saturday in News. hmallick@thestar.ca

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